Ron Campbell’s dream role: Don Quixote

Ron Campbell unwinding after a rehearsal for “Don Quixote” at Marin Shakespeare Company.

Ron Campbell unwinding after a rehearsal for “Don Quixote” at Marin Shakespeare Company.

Photo: Steven Underwood

Photo: Steven Underwood

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Ron Campbell unwinding after a rehearsal for “Don Quixote” at Marin Shakespeare Company.

Ron Campbell unwinding after a rehearsal for “Don Quixote” at Marin Shakespeare Company.

Photo: Steven Underwood

Ron Campbell’s dream role: Don Quixote

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Ron Campbell, who most recently had Berkeley Rep audiences in stitches as the ancient waiter Alfie in “One Man, Two Guvnors,” has been such an established Bay Area presence for five years that we sometimes forget we have to share him with the rest of the world. We’re about to get another reminder, but not until after he gets done playing the title role in the U.S. premiere of a Canadian version of “Don Quixote” at Marin Shakespeare Company.

We’re not alone. Before he did his tour de force solo in “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe” in 2000 — and moved here during its two much-extended runs — Campbell was a mainstay of Los Angeles theater. He grew up in Topanga Canyon (Los Angeles County) before taking off to hone his skills as a street performer in Venice, Rome and Paris in the late ’70s. By the ’80s, he was back in L.A., co-founding the Actors’ Gang (with Tim Robbins, among others) and working regularly at the Mark Taper Forum and San Diego Rep, where “Bucky Fuller” was developed.

For the first decade of this century, he was ours — from Cal Shakes, where he was (and still is) an associate artist, to ACT, Aurora and Teatro ZinZanni. Then he was gone for five years, touring the world as lead clown with Cirque du Soleil’s “Kooza.” He returned in early 2014, reprising “Bucky” at San Jose Rep, and has been gracing such stages as Cal Shakes and TheatreWorks ever since. Once “Don Quixote” closes, he’s off to Seattle to star with ZinZanni through January, after which he’s back at San Diego Rep to take on “Bucky” again and work on a new, solo version of “The Dybbuk.”

Meanwhile, he’s bought and fixed up an old warehouse in Emeryville as a rehearsal space and site for his Soar Feat Studios — where he teaches acting, clown and solo performance — and a home for himself and his wife, floral designer Momoko Shimokado. A dedicated martial arts student, particularly of iaido and aikido, and a sailor, he’s also one of the funniest prolific contributors to the Twitterverse (@SoarFeat). We caught up with him at home.

Q:You’re how old now?

A: Old. You can say I’m a veteran actor.

Q:I understand playing Don Quixote has been one of your impossible dreams since you were a child.

A: When I was around 8 years old, we were in Scotland with my grandmother and she took me to see “Man of La Mancha.” At that time, Richard Kiley was doing it. And when he sang “The Impossible Dream,” with that spotlight just focused on his face as he passed away, little 8-year-old me went berserk. I completely broke down. And as my grandmother would tell the story every Thanksgiving, a kindly usher came up and said, “What do we have here?” This little kid in a puddle of tears. And she said, “Well, he thinks the man has died.” And he said, “Oh no” — and they took me down underneath the stage and there was Richard Kiley with cold cream all over his face, wiping off his makeup. That was like the Resurrection to me. That’s when the hook went in. I immediately started making up plays with my little brothers after that.

Q:How did you find this version?

A: One of my co-clowns with “Kooza” was Colin Heath (co-author, with Peter Anderson), and he gave me a copy to read, and I said I wanted to do it with him when we get done with the Cirque. And he agreed. But he’s still with “Kooza.” So when Robert and Lesley Currier at Marin Shakes asked me if there was a play I really wanted to do and I said “Don Quixote” — I asked Colin to send them the latest version and they read it and liked it.

Q:What attracted you to it?

A: Well I love to sing and to dance, but I really can’t. Not to get paid for it. So I couldn’t do “Man of La Mancha.” But that show’s given the world one version of “Don Quixote,” which is probably the least-read everyone-thinks-they’ve-read book in the world. And there’s two books. Cervantes wrote the second part 10 years later, and somebody else had written an unauthorized sequel in between to capitalize on the first book’s huge popularity. So Cervantes incorporated characters from that other book, and his second book gets kind of meta-meta. Colin and Peter had the smarts to realize plays are meta-meta too, so once we go into the second act, we’re in the second book, which most people don’t know as well and where an interesting thing happens. By this time, Don Quixote is famous. Everyone he meets knows him from the first book, and he’s getting tired of trying to keep up with that myth. It’s very accessible to audiences. Men cry and kids laugh.

Q:Comic-poignant?

A: Exactly. I’m always searching for that kind of thing — that twangy sad-happy. That juxtaposition of emotions in the same moment is delicious to me.

Robert Hurwitt is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. E-mail: rhurwitt@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RobertHurwitt

Not all of Ron Campbell’s many daily tweets are funny. Some are about the progress of the show he’s working on or the next one coming up, or about the acting classes he’s offering. But he can almost always be relied upon to crack the daily routine with a smile or a good hearty chuckle or two. It’s not just his facility with puns that I like, but the anarchic quality he brings to the form. Here are 10 posts culled from the last few weeks before publication of this article. (Ron Campbell’s Twitter username: @SoarFeat)

Does the 5 second rule apply to people you’ve let down?

Most of the exercise I get is in futility.

I don’t want to get mired in quags.

I heard roomers rue more but it was only a rumor.

Some people are idiots. But remember: Idiots are people too.

I want to move to a town called Dignant so I can call someone and say I’m in Dignant.

Swinging foot fetishist seeks podiatryst.

Some states I just don’t understand. Like Whyoming?

They search for Extraterrestrials in space but I see a lot of extra terrestrials right here on Earth.